[lbenes]

Besides high quality hardware support and device availability. The fact of the matter is the core of Android is OPEN SOURCE. I can and have built every last bit of software on my Moto X4 thanks to LineageOS, which is based on AOSP.

[naraic0o]

wow. even the drivers? say, for the radio?

[monocasa]

The drivers for the radio are generally open, it's the radio firmware that isn't.

[naraic0o]

ah right. the point still stands, though. i was also under the impression that many of the device drivers that ship with with modern android phones are closed source. see the step in building lineage "Extract proprietary blobs"[0]

[0] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/payton/build#extract-prop...

[monocasa]

Those are the firmware pieces running on the cores that aren't even running Android as their OS for the most part, so it's not really applicable to the root discussion.

[farisjarrah]

Not the parent commenter that you are replying to, but yes LineageOS even gets the radios working. Its a full mobile android distribution that works great

[naraic0o]

i know, it's what i use daily :) i'm fairly confident they have no builds that are "blobless" though - part of the build process is to extract proprietary code blobs from manufacturer images which are not open source, see [0]

[0] https://wiki.lineageos.org/proprietary_blobs.html

[farisjarrah]

Yes thats true, unfortunately GSM radios are all proprietary still